In Matthew 11:30, Jesus invites His followers to take on His yoke: “…for my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”
This verse always troubled me. I wasn’t really interested in obeying Jesus’ request. In the first place, I’m much more comfortable in pants, t-shirts, and tennis shoes. If a change of clothes was required, I’d much prefer the suit of armor described in Ephesians 6:11-17. That get-up, I could get into!
Secondly, yokes are meant for oxen. I don’t belong to that species.
That leads to my third point. Putting a person into a yoke conjures up images of servitude. Who wants to be a servant? Being sinfully human, I want to have servants, instead of being a servant. Along with a few other things like a mansion and a million dollars in the bank. Maybe own a country. The usual stuff.
You can’t have any of that if you’re walking around with a yoke around your neck. An ox in a yoke can’t do anything except what the oxdriver wants. Oxdriver wants to go right, the ox has to go right. Oxdriver wants to hunt seashells, the ox has to hunt seashells. The oxdriver never asks the ox for its opinion about anything, nor does he ever say to the ox, “How about you just do whatever you want.”
However, Jesus uses the adjective ‘easy’ to describe His yoke. Doesn’t that qualify as an oxymoron? Isn’t it clever I was able to use the word ‘oxymoron’ in a discussion about an ox?
The adjective ‘easy’ is the crux of the whole statement. Jesus reinforces that adjective in His next statement: “…my burden is light.” Another oxymoron! Name one light burden in your life. If you have a light burden, then it’s not a burden. It’s a bummer. Bummers are light. I miss a ten-foot putt. Bummer!
Yet Jesus speaks truth. Always has, always will. So we have to find out why He would say something so incongruous in our minds.
The answer doesn’t lie in what manner the ox obeys the oxdriver. If the ox complains the entire time, that doesn’t constitute an easy yoke. If the ox grits its bovine teeth and guts out its obedience to all orders from the oxdriver, that’s not an easy yoke. That’s not a light burden—it’s not a bummer.
The quality of the easy yoke is absolute, universal. Jesus says so. He adds no conditions to His two statements. He simply says they are. His yoke is easy before you even put it on. It’s easy after you put it on. How can that be?
The key is knowing to what oxen respond.
Commands.
God issues commands. To some people, it seems like He issues thousands of commands of ‘do this’ and thousands of commands of ‘don’t do that.’ If that describes an easy yoke, wouldn’t we hate to see a difficult yoke?
It sounds daunting until we consider this truth: 99.99% of God’s commands deal with relationships—either our relationship with Him or with others. The other .01%? I haven’t uncovered that one command yet. If you know a command that doesn’t deal with relationships, please feel free to share it with me.
What causes the most despair and distress in any person’s life? It’s when a relationship is either destroyed or broken. Death is sad for us because it ends a relationship. Divorce causes intense distress for everyone involved. These examples of dismantled relationships show how a yoke can be anything but easy, burdens which are not light.
God’s commands are all about how to live in relationships, how to build wonderfully solid relationships. When we don’t infuse those commands into our relationships with our spouses, children, neighbors, friends, and, most especially, our God, then we will continually walk into heavy burdens, hardcore and uncomfortable yokes. Our faces grow perpetual frowns. We totter anxiously on thin ice, waiting for the weight of a horrible relationship or a broken relationship to plunge us into a frigid lake of despair.
There is a better way. It’s the easy yoke. Living in the easy yoke of wonderful relationships brings good qualities into our lives, like peace, goodness, self-control and joy. It healthfully resolves issues for us and brings light into the tunnel—to exactly where you are in the tunnel. There is no requirement saying you have to wait until you’re at the end of the tunnel. Bring the light of Christ now. As He intends and desires for you.
Remember, it’s His yoke. He simply wants you to live in the benefit of it. That’s what this blog is about. Living the easy yoke that Jesus promises is possible. We’ll explore all the ways God’s commands help create an easy yoke, a light burden.
My hope is you will find peace here. Hopefully, you will smile while you’re here—maybe even laugh. And when you leave, you will leave strengthened and encouraged.
Ironic, huh? That you would be strengthened by an easy yoke? One of my favorite attributes of our God is His mastery of irony. He is an ironical God with an easy yoke. Listen to Him.